Hello all,

I am working on a watch movement concept that I have had in my mind for a while now, and I am finally modelling it so that I can visualize it and try to see if it is even possible.

I have started by figuring out the gear ratios I need, modelling all of the gears and then assembling them together - the goal being to position all of the gears first, then model a derived part which would be the skeletal frame which holds the gears in place. There are three gears who's positions I have fully defined, the rest of the gears positions are intentionally not fully defined, but defined enough that I can move them around and they keep the desired spacing from each other. Also note that I am not using actual gear mates, I am just using distance mates and alignments so I can work out positions for now, I am not worried about motion simulation yet. I hope I am not providing TMI, I just try to be thorough.

There is one part of the movement where I want to place a bevel gear who's position is fully defined, then I want to mate another bevel gear to it, but not fully define it's position yet. I do however want to define it's positon in certain ways. I'm not sure how to describe it best, but I will try.

Let's imagine that the bevel gears are two cones. I mean, they are like cones, and the two points of the cones would be coincident, and the circular edges of the cones would be tangent. Of course SW won't let me tangent mate edges, and it won't let me make the cone points coincident. I modeled the gears by sketching their profile, then lofting that profile up to a point. Then I cut away most of the cone, just leaving a beveled gear. The point still exists as a sketch on a plane, but I can't seem to mate sketch components. If I could mate in these ways, one gear would stay in place, while I could freely move the other gear around to experiment with different positions, but it would still maintion the corect distance and angle relative to the fixed gear.

I attached a picture trying to describe what I mean. Nothing fancy, just a quick and dirty representation of my goal. I know it's not made in SW, my home computer doesn't have SW, but the actual detailed model is being made in SW. Any ideas on how to achieve this?